Whiplash

I never would have called myself a big fan of boxing or movies about boxing, but I've seen my fair share at this point. Whiplash is a movie that has boxing as a key plot element, but it's debatable how much this movie is focused on the sport. It's more like a mix of noir and romance in my mind. The problem is, I don't know how invested I was in the romance between the 2 leads. I certainly didn't want her getting together with the other guy, but I didn't feel many sparks between Dane Clark and Alexis Smith. One of my struggles with this film, and most plots of this type, is the fact that they rely on one of the romantic leads simply refusing to communicate properly. So many issues crop up because they don't talk about their history, or what might happen to the other person if they get involved. Nearly every story of love needs some type of conflict to make it interesting, but this method of creating a rift between two people just feels played out and a bit lazy. But even without that part of the plot there simply wasn't much that I found to latch onto in this film that was enjoyable or original. I'm about a week or two removed from when I watched Whiplash and I'm already starting to forget it. This is a film that won't stick with me, even though it's not a bad at all.

The thing that surprised me the most about Whiplash is that Warner Brothers actually teamed Alexis Smith and Dane Clark for a film. Smith had a lot of trouble in her career because she was so tell and trouble finding leading men to appear opposite her. And Dane Clark was short, James Cagney and Alan Ladd type short. If you look real carefully he's built up in height somewhat in the scenes where Warner Brothers showed both of them in full figure and those are rare in this film.

Clark was Warner Brothers back up for John Garfield and Garfield had left Warner Brothers at this point. Clark was obviously getting the scripts that Garfield had left or maybe had turned down.

In Whiplash Clark is a struggling artist who lives in southern California and a traveling Alexis Smith likes his work and they begin a hot and heavy affair. Then she abruptly walks out and Clark is all at sea. He goes east to find her and he does and finds she's married to a wheelchair bound Zachary Scott.

Scott was once a promising fighter and if he can't be champion he wants to manage one. When Clark knocks out a middleweight contender, Scott is willing to forget the affair with Smith if he'll fight for him. And Clark proves pretty adept in the ring.

Whiplash is the kind of film that would have been far better had the all pervasive Code not been in place. What we're beating around the bush not talking about is impotence. Scott is incapable and he's a nasty creature and Alexis just isn't getting any.

The ending is straight out of one of those Thirties type boxing films and I won't elaborate. Let's just say what happened no way should have happened.

The players are fine and special mention should go to Eve Arden for simply being Eve Arden and Jeffrey Lynn for playing Smith's alcoholic doctor brother who steps up to the plate at the climax. But Whiplash would have been a better film with a more realistic script and the Code not dictating a lot of pussyfooting around some frank issues.

Good, tough noir with an excellent cast. Watching the film it becomes obvious that it was planned for Joan Crawford so closely does Alexis Smith's character follow the Crawford 40's blueprint. Dane Clark's tortured painter turned boxer was surely likewise designed with John Garfield in mind as it adheres to his screen persona as well. For whatever reason those A-listers either passed or were unavailable and the film moved over to the B unit and this cast. As good as the leads are they were considered up and comers at the time and definitely represented the second string at Warners.

Back to the film it is sharply shot with effective use of the shadowy black and white photography. Zachary Scott adds another hissable villain to his vast array, Eve Arden pops up from time to time, once in an outfit that looks like she took the cloth off her kitchen table and fashioned it into an ensemble, to add her special brand of spice to the proceedings and many of Warners stock company, Alan Hale, S.Z. Sakall etc. fill out the cast. While the direction is adequate someone who was more of a stylist, for example Michael Curtiz, could have sharpened some slack edges and made the film really cook. Still as is its certainly worth investing the ninety minutes that it runs.

Shake together John Garfield's roles as a violinist in Humoresque and a prizefighter in Body and Soul (hits of the previous couple of years), and out comes Dane Clark's character in Whiplash. He's a beach bum who daubs canvases in a coastal town near San Francisco. But when reclusive vacationer Alexis Smith buys one of his seascapes, she ignites a torch in him that won't sputter out. When she abruptly departs, he travels east and sets up a studio in New York while he tracks her down. It proves a bad career move.

He finds Smith singing in a nightclub, only to discover that she's married to Zachary Scott, its owner and a former middleweight champ now confined to a wheelchair. Scott, sadistic and embittered, lives the fight game vicariously – through the cohort of ex-boxers who keep his wife in place and through new talent he exploits then drops. In Clark, he sees a contender. Wanting to keep close to Smith (who keeps warning him off), Clark signs up for work on another kind of canvas....

In addition to the always welcome Alexis Smith, the movie boasts good supporting work from Eve Arden, a gal pal with a crush on Clark, and from Jeffrey Lynn, as Smith's alcoholic brother, a doctor working in Scott's gym. Scott himself brings nothing new to the kind of part he found himself typecast in: the effete, insinuating villain. That leaves Clark, who was plainly being groomed as the second-string Garfield but who never left much of an impression on the movies.

The direction, by the undistinguished Lewis Seiler, can only be graded adequate; he keeps things moving along but never tries for anything different or offbeat or striking. In this he's matched by a lackluster script (it was the late ‘40s; couldn't the dialogue have been a little more etched?). Nonetheless, Whiplash endures as a routine B-movie, with noirish coloration, that reflects the themes and plot-lines of post-war melodrama.

Mike (Dane Clark) is a nice guy who loves to paint. One day, he meets Laurie and they fall in love. However, Laurie is an odd one...hot one minute, cold the next. And, soon, without warning, she simply disappears. Not surprisingly, Mike is a mess and spends a lot of time looking for her. His search leads him back east and he eventually learns that she's the wife of a hood. Rex (Zachary Scott) is a rich, menacing sort of guy who seems, at times, like a cat playing with mice. So, when he offers to train Mike and make him a champion boxer, you know that somehow it's all part of Rex's machinations...and you wonder WHAT he has in mind for his wife and Mike.

This film has some wonderful and snappy noir-style dialog. So much of what Rex says seems to be oozing with menace and the writers did a nice job of this one. It also helped that although this was more of a 'second-stringer' sort of movie with the lesser stars at Warner, they all are simply terrific. My only complaint, and it's a problem in most boxing films, is that the matches are unrealistic...with WAY too many punches being thrown and landed throughout the fights. Still, a hard-hitting film with lots to recommned it.

By the way, I was originally going to give this one an 8. However, the ending turned out to be so cool and satisfying, it earned an extra point. WOW...what a finale!